head to head · open source
beszel vs Checkmate
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars, 1,025 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Checkmate has 10,857 stars, 1,206 forks, 114 open issues and last shipped yesterday. beszel leads on adoption by 135% (25,541 vs 10,857 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; Checkmate is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, Checkmate 11%. Checkmate was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| beszel | Checkmate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Checkmate if
- You want the Checkmate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Checkmate fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About Checkmate
Checkmate is an open source, self hosted monitoring application for infrastructure and observability. It is written in TypeScript and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. The repository contains the frontend and backend, and the project sits in the infrastructure monitoring ecosystem for teams that need to track servers, websites, and hardware status without relying on a hosted only product.
read the full Checkmate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or Checkmate more popular?
beszel has 25,541 GitHub stars and Checkmate has 10,857. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and Checkmate free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and Checkmate under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and Checkmate?
beszel is written in Go and Checkmate in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, beszel or Checkmate?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,541 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Checkmate if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.